How little we know

[fivemack]

Google Maps gives you really unrealistic expectations for what scrolling image viewers can offer you.

The Hubble Legacy Archive contains basically every image Hubble has taken, except those less than a year old where the investigator hasn't finished writing the paper yet. You can view them in a scrolling image viewer: here is the giant elliptical galaxy Maffei 1 in near-infra-red light (represented as orange) and sort of greenish-yellow light (represented as teal). It has a sort of nicotine-stained hue to it, and the brown wisps to the right of the core are dust in our galaxy rather than in Maffei-1.

But that image is really all there is. You can zoom in if you want, but rather than suddenly switching to an aerial view where you can zoom in further and count the cars and believe that you could tell which of the little people below is wearing the red-and-white horizontally striped shirt, the pixels just get fuzzier. Hubble is the highest-resolution telescope we have that can take pictures this wide; Keck doesn't seem to have taken any pictures of this galaxy, it's about thirty pixels across in the image from Spitzer.

It's all that is known; and it's a nicotine-stained oval blob.

Comments

[lnr]

That's somehow quite poetic.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

You kids these days have it soft, sitting in your comfy swivel chairs looking at pictures on your damn computers.

In the old days, if you wanted to see any of this stuff, you had to go over to William Herschel's house, probably shivering in the cold, climb a rickety stepladder, and look through an eyepiece.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have been to Herschel's house in Bath, which is a fascinating museum of period astronomy, with lots of great stuff about William and Caroline. When I stood in the place in his garden where Herschel had actually discovered Uranus, the very spot on which he found a new planet, an actual new planet from right there, I found myself unexpectedly blinded by tears.

And galaxies like grains of sand, and I like galaxies.

And I am running seti@home because we all want to zoom in.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I have been to Herschel's house in Bath...

I envy you that.